After a year of huge headlines for children’s health, we’ve finally arrived at our last roundup of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia research news for 2017. The latest developments cap off a benchmark year of discovery, with new advances in treating childhood blindness, novel initiatives to study traumatic brain injury, and wonderful stories from a variety of media outlets that highlight the efforts and accomplishments of our Mitochondrial Medicine Frontier Program and The Raymond G. Perelman Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics. We think this edition’s collection of news items herald exciting things to come in 2018!

Around seven years ago during a well visit at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a 12-year-old boy told Saba Khan, MD, an attending physician at CHOP, that there was one problem she could not fix. Intrigued, Dr. Khan asked him to explain further. At first hesitant, the young man finally explained what he meant. He had a pain in his belly that never went away, and he knew exactly what that pain was: Hunger. “I’m always hungry,” he said to Dr. Khan.

Dr. Khan was floored. At the time, she was unfamiliar about how to address the issue of food insecurity because she had not yet encountered it in primary care practice.

A two-step electronic alert system successfully reduced missed sepsis diagnoses in children by 76 percent. The new pediatric protocol, which incorporates the use of vital signs, risk factors, and a clinician’s judgment, shows promise as a sensitive and specific tool that can help pediatricians working in the emergency department (ED) save lives.

The majority of adolescent males receiving care in the pediatric emergency department after experiencing a violence-related injury — typically from peer assaults — felt they needed mental health services, according to a study by researchers from the Violence Intervention Program (VIP) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Looking at ways to improve children’s health from different perspectives is what pediatric research at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is all about. Take a look at three examples in this week’s In the News.